An OpenFlow (OpenFlow) technology was originally proposed by Stanford University to resolve, by using an innovative internetworking concept and based on technical conditions of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), various bottleneck problems that occur when new services are provided on current networks.
According to a core idea of the OpenFlow technology, a packet forwarding process that is originally entirely controlled by a switching device (the switching device may be, for example, a switch or a router) changes to be collaboratively completed by an OpenFlow switch (OpenFlow switch) and a software defined network (SDN) controller (SDN Controller).
The SDN controller may deliver, to the OpenFlow switch actively or when the OpenFlow switch sends a request, a flow table entry used to indicate a packet forwarding processing manner. The OpenFlow switch performs, according to the flow table entry delivered by the SDN controller, forwarding processing on a received packet that matches the flow table entry.
In the prior art, the flow table entry delivered by the SDN controller to the OpenFlow switch at any time is a complete standard flow table entry. The SDN controller sometimes also delivers tens or hundreds of flow table entries to the OpenFlow switch at one time. When the SDN controller delivers complete standard flow table entries, in some cases, relatively high overheads of a control channel may be caused, which increases a congestion risk of the control channel, and a relatively large quantity of network processing resources of both the SDN controller and the OpenFlow switch are occupied.